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To honor contributions of legendary Production Designers and Art Directors of the past, the Art Directors Guild has established a Hall of Fame that inducts new members into its ranks at the Annual Awards Banquet.
EDWARD CARFAGNO
1907-1996
Edward Carfagno's career spanned six decades as one of the most prolific and successful Production Designers in the history of filmmaking. The extraordinary breadth and epic scale of his more than eighty films rank him at the very top of our profession.
Born in Los Angeles, Carfagno attended USC from 1927-1933 and earned his graduate degree in Architecture as a classmate of Production Designers Boris Leven, Al Nozaki and Robert Boyle. Following his graduation, Carfagno was hired by Cedric Gibbons at MGM and quickly rose through the ranks. He was a senior draftsman on the Wizard of Oz (1939, designed by William Hornung and Gibbons) and in 1943 was allowed to design his first film, Best Foot Forward, a musical comedy starring Lucille Ball. He went on to spend almost forty years at MGM designing films, and the occasional television program.
While at USC, Ed took up fencing, eventually becoming captain of the team, and winning intercollegiate championships, single and team titles. His interest in the sport continued well beyond college and into his working years. As part of the Los Angeles Athletic Club team, he won the Pacific Coast team championship in epee fifteen times between 1933 and 1951. He was a member of the team which defeated Cuba in 1939 and he was elected to the 1940 U.S. Olympic Fencing Team in foil. Those games, to be held in London, were cancelled because of World War II and Carfagno was unable to compete.
Though he began designing musicals and comedies'The Canterville Ghost (1944), Ziegfield Follies (1946), The Barkleys of Broadway (1949)'he will be ultimately remembered for his spectacular epic designs for ancient Rome in Quo Vadis (1951), Julius Caesar (1953) and Ben Hur (1959). He often worked at Cinecitta, and quickly became MGM's 'Italian' Art Director.
The central years of his career, all at MGM, read like a history of that studio's triumphs: Neptune's Daughter (1949), Take the High Ground (1953), Something of Value (1957), The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm (1962), The Cincinnati Kid (1965), Soylent Green and The Man Who Loved Cat Dancing (both 1973). When the MGM Art Department finally closed its doors for good, Carfagno went free-lance, designing The Hindenburg (1975) and Gable and Lombard (1976) for Universal and Meteor (1979) for AIP.
During the 1980s, Carfagno became Clint Eastwood's regular Production Designer, working on nine films for the star's Malpaso Productions, including five directed by Eastwood himself: Honky Tonk Man (1982), Sudden Impact (1983) Pale Rider (1985), Heartbreak Ridge (1986), and Bird (1988). Carfagno's last film was Eastwood's adventure comedy Pink Cadillac in 1989.
Nominated for the Academy Award' thirteen times, he won three Oscars' for The Bad and the Beautiful in 1952, Julius Caesar in 1953 and Ben Hur in 1959. His bronze marker at Forest Lawn in the Hollywood Hills commemorates his achievements: 'Olympian, Architetto, Loving Father.' To that we are pleased to add: Art Directors Guild Hall of Fame.
STEPHEN B. GRIMES
1927-1988
Stephen Grimes was born in Weybridge, Surrey, England and spent his career working with only a few of cinema's finest directors: David Lean, John Huston, Sidney Pollack, among others. While most designers would envy the chance at one film with any of these, Grimes became the favorite designer of each, and most called on him again and again. His career is an object lesson in the value a Production Designer can hold for a director, and of the value the designer derives from steadfast loyalty to a talented director.
Grimes worked in television early in his career in England, and was fortunately available when Production Designer Geoffrey Drake asked him to do the drafting and work as his Assistant Art Director on a feature film, an American project that was coming to shoot at Elstree studios: John Huston was directing Ray Bradbury's script for Moby Dick (1956) with Gregory Peck. The film, of course, became one of the great adventure films of all time. A year later, when Huston went to the Caribbean to film Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison (1957), Grimes came too, this time as Huston's Production Designer. The partnership lasted the rest of Huston's life.
Grimes had a superior sense of style and the wonderful ability to completely capture a bygone era. Huston's final film, The Dead (1987), based on the James Joyce story, interpreted perfectly the nostalgic mood of the story and the elegance of the era. In all, Grimes designed twelve films for Huston, among them The Roots of Heaven (1958), The Misfits (1961), Night of the Iguana (1967), and Reflections In a Golden Eye (1969).
Between these assignments, a thirty-year-old television director was hired to replace Huston on a film. The project was Tennessee Williams' This Property is Condemned (1966), and the director was Sydney Pollack. Pollack writes:
On that film I met a great Production Designer, Stephen B. Grimes, who I kept with me as long as he lived. He died rather tragically right after Out of Africa (1985) which was the last film he did for me. I got him because John Huston was originally on the picture and Grimes remained after I came on. Stephen Grimes and Cinematographer James Wong Howe did some extraordinary things. It was a great experience because it was the first time I got to work with Wong Howe, Robert Redford, and Stephen Grimes, who really became a close colleague of mine. I worked with him on every film I could after that.
Some of those films were: The Way We Were (1973), Three Days of the Condor (1975), and The Electric Horseman (1979).
Stephen Grimes also designed wonderful films in almost every genre. Ryan's Daughter (1970) for David Lean, Neil Simon's comedy Murder by Death (1976), Urban Cowboy (1980), On Golden Pond (1981), Krull and the James Bond epic Never Say Never Again (both 1983), and The Dresser (also 1983). He received his Oscar' for Out of Africa, and was also nominated for Night of the Iguana and The Way We Were. He received a BAFTA nomination for Ryan's Daughter. Stephen Grimes passed away of a heart attack while filming Haunted Summer (1988) in Positano, Italy.
DALE HENNESY
1926-1981
Dale Hennesy was first introduced to the motion picture industry by his father, Hugh Hennesy, a layout artist for Disney. The younger Hennesy studied painting and motion picture illustration at the School for Allied Arts in Glendale, and began his career as an illustrator at 20th Century Fox.
Hennesy was one of the premiere illustrators in the industry throughout the 1950's, working for John DeCuir on The King and I (1956) and for Walt Disney, evolving concept illustrations for the original Disneyland. He was a signature member of the American Watercolor Society until his death. In 1963 he made his move into Production Design on two Jack Lemmon comedies at Columbia, Under the Yum Yum Tree (1963) and Good Neighbor Sam (1964), but he will always be remembered best for his striking designs for science-fiction and fantasy films.
Fantastic Voyage (1966) won Dale his Oscar', and established his stature among designers. The story of a group of scientists who are shrunken and then travel by miniature submarine through a human body to locate and destroy a blood clot allowed Dale to combine his exceptional imagination with such meticulous research that medical organizations today still talk of their new imaging technologies as 'fantastic voyages.' Battle For the Planet of the Apes, Woody Allen's Sleeper (both 1973), and Logan's Run (1976) extended his command of the genre.
Dale's talent was far too extensive to be limited to one type of film, however. He designed Dirty Harry (1971) and dressed down the streets of San Francisco to emphasize their seedier aspects, creating a film noir masterpiece in color. His Woody Allen films, Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Sex* (*but were afraid to ask) (1972) and Sleeper are filled with perversely hillarious sets. Young Frankenstein (1974) was at once an homage to, and a parody of, Charles 'Danny' Hall's Universal horror films of the 1930's. When Dale took over designing the 1976 King Kong remake, he asked the question: where did primitive south sea islanders obtain the knowledge to build that massive masonry wall to encage the giant ape' Hennesy conceived, instead, a monumental structure of bamboo and palm trunks, lashed together with sisal. He was always the thinking person's Production Designer.
Musicals were not in vogue during most of Hennesy's career, but when Columbia decided to bring Annie (1982) to the screen, he was producer Ray Stark's first choice to design it. As usual, Dale's settings were masterpieces, but this time he didn't live to see them finished. Dale Hennesy died in the middle of production and Gene Callahan was asked to finish the film. Callahan accepted but refused to have his name listed in the credits, giving the credit to the late Dale Hennesy.
The New York tenement street outside the Annie orphanage, designed by Dale, is a permanent fixture on the Warner Bros. lot to this day, and has been used in countless movies and television shows ever since. Backlot streets are traditionally named after the film for which they were built. Hennesy Street is the only street in the industry to be named after the designer who originally conceived it.
JAMES W. TRITTIPO
1928-1971
James Trittipo was born in Genoa, Ohio and attended high school in Dayton after his father retired as an interior decorator and opened a restaurant in the nearby town of Gambier. As a young man, Trittipo was always drawn to the theater. When he wasn't accepted into the Yale Drama School, he studied theatrical design at Carnegie Tech and quickly became that school's finest designer. After graduating, he moved to New York to design for the Broadway stage.
Like many young theater designers in the early 1950's, he discovered the new field of television. Jim hated inactivity and thrived on the breakneck pace of live television. He soon found himself working with two first-time directors, Franklin Schaffner and Don Medford, on live television's first science fiction anthology series, Tales of Tomorrow (1951-1953), turning out amazing settings every week'Frankenstein's lab and Captain Nemo's submarine among them'for the tiny ABC broadcast studios in New York.
When ABC bought the old Vitagraph film lot at Prospect and Talmadge in Hollywood for their West Coast facility, Trittipo was one of the first designers sent to work there. Jim loved Southern California and the glamour of Hollywood, and he soon moved west to stay. Here he would become one of the preeminent designers working in network television. His imagination and endless energy drove him to push the boundaries of the medium with every set on every show. In 1959 he staged a Bing Crosby special in a set built only of piles of raw lumber. Later the same year he talked Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby and Dean Martin into singing a medley while hanging on a set of playground monkey bars. Nothing Jim ever designed was safe or predictable.
In 1964, he signed onto the show that would energize his career, and provide him his first Emmy Award'. The Hollywood Palace (1964-1970) was a combination musical-variety show and old-time vaudeville circus. Stars like Bing Crosby or Judy Garland would host each week, and guest acts such as Louis Armstrong or the Rolling Stones would be intermingled with Bertha, the Dancing Elephant or the Flying Wallendas. Staged in the old El Capitan Theater on Vine Street The Palace was a riot of chasing lights and glitter, and the more extravagant acts often had to be shot against sets built in the adjacent parking lot. Jim stayed with the series from beginning to end and designed more than two thousand sets in his stunning, flamboyant style.
Throughout the 1960s, while he was still designing The Hollywood Palace, Jim did large variety specials for all three networks with Fred Astaire, Mitzi Gaynor, Frank Sinatra'one after another. He thrived on the impossible pace. He won a second Emmy for a Fred Astaire special. He took on a dramatic project, The File on Devlin (1970), a videotaped Hallmark Hall of Fame, and earned another nomination. He was at the peak of his form, the finest designer working in television.
When Jim died suddenly of a heart attack at 43 years old, his design colleagues were stunned. His drive and energy were so great, his command of the work and his skills were so prodigious, that it seemed he could never be stopped. He won a third Emmy posthumously for Robert Young and the Family (1971). We can only imagine where this extraordinary designer's talents would have taken him had he lived.
LYLE WHEELER
1905-1990
Lyle Wheeler was born in Woburn, Massachusetts, and studied industrial design and architecture at USC. After his graduation, he worked alternately as an architect, and industrial designer and a magazine illustrator until Cedric Gibbons hired him as a sketch artist at MGM. He rose to the position of Assistant Art Director, but left MGM in 1935 to become an Art Director for David O. Selznick at his new studio.
Though the studio was small, Selznick, like Wheeler, came from MGM and wanted the same kind of exaggerated, impressive settings. Wheeler's personal style was more realistic than Gibbons' deco-influenced style, and his designs for Little Lord Fauntleroy (1936) and The Prisoner of Zenda (1937) were both richly detailed, massive productions. Zenda earned Wheeler his first Oscar' nomination.
When Selznick hired William Cameron Menzies to supervise all visual aspects of Gone With the Wind (1939), it became Wheeler's job to interpret Menzies' sketches, to fill in the details, and to design the sets. Wheeler consulted libraries for historical references, traveled throughout the South, and won his first Academy Award'. He followed that epic film with Rebecca (1940), one of the most stunning black and white movies ever produced, and received another nomination.
When Selznick closed his company, Wheeler sought work elsewhere and eventually went to work at 20th Century Fox where he would spend the majority of his career. At first, he was a unit Art Director working for Supervising Art Director Richard Day. Wheeler's most influential early film at Fox was Laura (1944) which became a film noir classic. He continued in that style with The House On 92nd Street, Fallen Angel (both 1945), and Forever Amber (1947).
In 1947, Wheeler succeeded Richard Day and went on to become one of the great Supervising Art Directors of Hollywood's Golden Age. His era was characterized by the transition from black-and-white to color, by the emergence of wide-screen formats, and by the move toward more extensive location shooting. Wheeler was an active participant in designing many of his studio's films, such as the Otto Preminger classics Whirlpool (1949), Where the Sidewalk Ends (1950), and The 13th Letter (1951).
Throughout this period, Wheeler continuously received Oscar nominations and awards, as was the practice for Supervising Art Directors at that time. His record - his Art Department's record - is second only to Gibbons at MGM.
In 1962, when Fox closed their Art Department, Wheeler went out on his own. He renewed his relationship with Otto Preminger and designed Advise and Consent (1962), The Cardinal (1963), In Harm's Way (1965), and Tell Me You Love Me, Junie Moon (1969). He received his final Academy nomination for The Cardinal.
When Wheeler retired in 1978, he had received five Oscars and twenty-nine nominations, and his legacy included many of the finest pictures produced during Hollywood's Golden Age.
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